News flash: Heteropatriarchy gets prof down to her very last nerve

One of our readers, a college professor, sends a link to a delightful online device at the University of Chicago: Write Your Own Academic Sentence. It’s a random sentence generator that lets anybody write prose like a tenured pomo professor. For example, look what I just “wrote”:

The epistemology of post-capitalist hegemony clarifies the position of the invention of the gendered body. The emergence of normative value(s) is, and yet is not, the engendering of pedagogical institutions.

Wow, that was great! Next thing you know, I’m going to be having mojitos with Luce Irigaray, discussing her theory that E=mc-squared is a “sexed” equation because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.” No, I’m not making this up. You rarely have to with these people.

Well, our reader writes, it appears that someone has been using the generator to grind out an actual position paper, or somesuch thing. Writing in Religion Studies News, an online publication of the American Academy of Religion, Andrea Smith, who teaches media and cultural studies at UC-Riverside, sounds the alarm about “Multicultural White Supremacy and Heteropatriachy (sic): Fostering Insurgent Scholarship in the Academy.” It turns out that Smith is trying to rally opposition to multiculturalism and affirmative action because they are not radical enough. This seems to be the gist of her complaint:

However, it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within — and sometimes indistinguishable from — the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which often relies on a politics of identity representation that is diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. In addition, in our post-affirmative action and so-called “post-racial” society, an ethnic studies narrowly confined identitarianism fails to speak to the emergence of a multicultural white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Um, I think she’s saying that the strategy of mau-mau’ing the establishment into establishing academic ghettoes called ethnic and gender studies departments may have backfired in that it has taught people not to take professors like her seriously, except as it allows colleges to present themselves on the market as embracing diversity. It might seem to you that the academy has done these otherwise unemployable people a favor by giving them academic sinecures while at the same time assuaging its own liberal guilt and anxiety, but no, according to Smith, this revolution has been co-opted by the Wizard of Oz capitalist heteropatriarchy. I could be wrong — but how can speakers of the English language be sure when confronted by prose like that? It gets better, or rather, worse. Our reader says this is his favorite passage from Smith:

By shifting the focus and expanding the scope of inquiry of ethnic studies from multiculturalism representation to the analytics of power and domination, ethnic/gender studies would become situated as an expansive field that addresses how the logics of domination structure the world for everyone, not just those who are racialized or gendered in particular ways.

Says our reader:

This isn’t just abuse of the English language, it’s first degree murder. People who write these things should be mocked mercilessly as intellectual lightweights who have nothing important to say and so hide the emptiness of their thoughts behind shallow jargon.

Seriously, almost everything wrong with the academy today is demonstrated in this one little article.

Is there any wonder that the academy is collapsing? What, precisely, is the possible economic rationale for supporting professors whose contribution to the commons is decadent, solipsistic mumbo-jumbo like that? Collapse faster, please!

Will the Higher Education Racket/Bubble, that is going to ask me to pay $50K/year in costs to support the likes of Ms Smith, pop in time to do me some good before my kids enter college? “Faster please”, indeed.

According to her department’s website, a colleague describes himself thus:

“His recent research reevaluates artists’ film and video production in the U.S. between 1965 and 1975. He maintains that this body of work destabilized philosophically grounded and self-contained interpretations of media ontology through the strategic use of open textuality.”

I studied mathematics and hard sciences, so I didn’t experience anything like that at my school. Frankly I doubt schools that teach hard sciences would be part of any devaluation of a college degree. The careers they prepare you for can’t be done without a period of intense study of that material.

William James, in “The Ph.D. Octopus”, and Edmund Wilson, in “The Fruits of the MLA”, discerned long ago, respectively, the structural forces behind, and effects upon literary scholarship of, the bureaucratic professionalism overtaking humanist academe. The apotheosis of Theory wedded to bad writing is of evergreen import, and the sorts of examples we see quoted above are, er, merely the latest iterations valorized during the post-colonialist hegemony of

Such linguistic butchery is hardly limited to postmodern professors, though, as almost any bookstore or library or newspaper or magazine or collective roster of literary awards will reveal at a glance. I was reminded of Dwight Macdonald, that most eccentrically Groucho among our sharpshooting, mid-century literary Marxmen, and his celebrated 1958 smackdown, originally published in Commentary, of James Gould Cozzens’ bestselling, widely-acclaimed novel By Love Possessed.

Among the serial stylistic infelicities of the novel, set in the world of lawyers, Macdonald quoted this gem – “The disposings of accustomed practice, the preparations of purpose and consent, the familiar mute motions of furtherance” – and noted that the passage was not from a legal document, but a key descriptive passage from a sex scene. Slyly twisting his blade further, he included in immediate parentheses a snippet from a review by novelist Jessamyn West: “The passages having to do with physical love have a surprising lyric power.”

Conservatives are predictably horrified when academics in the humanities and social sciences poke and prod at how our society constructs itself. But rather than talk about what those academics discover with their poking and prodding, the conservatives make lame jokes about the jargon.

Conservatives are predictably horrified when academics in the humanities and social sciences poke and prod at how our society constructs itself. But rather than talk about what those academics discover with their poking and prodding, the conservatives make lame jokes about the jargon.

I am a graduate studen in the humanities. You have no idea how tiresome it is listening to this banal discourse day in and day out. Nearly all readings are filtered through a Freudian, Nietzschean, or Marxist lens. This results in perpetual attacks on all institutions that do not further the Jacobin goals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. By this I mean: the liberty of libertines, equality of outcomes, and brotherhood of all humanity. So, they attack family, church, and provincial loyalties.

I think they use the jargon to obfuscate what it is that they are accomplishing. The majority of students adopt the Jacobin virtues as their own. Then, like their professors, they see the only hope of accomplishing their goals as existing in the state. So, if I ever seem radically opposed to statism, forgive me, it is just that I am surrounded by academics worshipping in front of the calf of bureaucracy on a daily basis. Moral of the story, fight for reform in the humanities.

Take heart Rod. All of this nonsense springs from the thesis that nothing is real and that what we take as reality is formed by power relations. No serious academic philosopher believes any of this anymore. Realism is the name of the game these days, it just hasn’t filtered down into the social sciences and liberal arts. Unfortunately it will probably take until the current members of these departments all die off, replacements hired and cultivated, and new generations of students educated and matured before it can make any headway.

I agree about the rhetoric. I thought everyone would. Park Hyun is right on the money. John E. has a valid point — even though I find most of the rhetoric to be a knee slapper. Hiding in the offending paragraph, I find a solid, conservative, truth.

The “liberal” impulse to feel patronizingly good by dividing everyone up into neat little ethnic and gender (and any other category available) communities of artificial interest is not having a real benefit for the mass of any of the people upon whom these titles of ethnicity are bestowed. In fact, it has merely empowered cliques of godfathers who feed on the distinctions. Also, this is all getting in the way of casting such artificialities aside in order to develop our common humanity. In fact, the paradigm inspiring and inspired by rap music may be fairly characterized as the last vestige of white supremacy. (If that’s not obvious, just ask and I’ll go into more detail).

Whenever I read gibberish such as that, I think: “What dominates my life is the quest for t____t p____y, loose shoes and a warm place to s___t.” Everything else is a foot note. See the movie Idiocracy.

In reply to Nagle, it is sad they way they twist Freud. He firmly believed in civilization, was one of the great literary critics, and wrote brilliant prose.

Actually, traditional Marxists don’t much like postmodernists. I took a history class in college taught by a very eminent Marxist historian of Latin America. He spent much more time mocking postmodernists than he did criticizing the Roman Catholic Church (for which he had a certain respect, due to its increasingly critical stance towards capitalism during the twentieth century). Not that he spent a lot of time criticizing either one, of course, most of his time was spent teaching history, but you get my point.

Rod,

Why does one need to defeat it? It’s self-defeating. Posmodernists don’t believe in truth, so they are unable to argue that their doctrine is truer than any other.

Re: Frankly I doubt schools that teach hard sciences would be part of any devaluation of a college degree

MH,

As a graduate student in the hard sciences, I’d say the problem here is that freaks like this increase public outrage at universities in general, and make it more likely that funding and respect for all academic pursuits, including yours and mine, is undermined.

Why does one need to defeat it? It’s self-defeating. Posmodernists don’t believe in truth, so they are unable to argue that their doctrine is truer than any other.

I see your point, Hector, but what about all the very real damage to the study of the humanities being done by these people?

Siarlys, you have (well, she has) something of a point, but note at the end of her diatribe that Smith is calling not for an attack on liberal multiculturalism for the sake of truth, but because it doesn’t give her class more power within the academy. It’s all about marching through the institutions and consolidating power.

I did a little googling about her, and it turns out Smith was turned down for tenure at the Univ of Michigan. The Women’s Studies dept recommended against her. Was a big controversy, but she had to leave the university. As far as I could tell from reading blogs of her supporters, they thought she deserved tenure because she is a Native American, and that she was being picked on by white feminists.

I’d say the problem here is that freaks like this increase public outrage at universities in general, and make it more likely that funding and respect for all academic pursuits, including yours and mine, is undermined.

And as far as the humanities go, it’s hard enough getting the public to think that the humanities are important to support. If this is the kind of Gnostic drivel produced by leading scholars of the humanities, then the public is right.

Where does a young person who actually loves literature and the humanities go to study to be a scholar and a professor, and avoid this nonsense? Is it possible?

I would suggest that the long term solution to this stuff is in how we raise our children. But for those of us who are academics, and I think that a number on this blog are, I might offer one shorter term possibility. Students can be taught to recognize this nonsense for what it is. I try to do this through a few means. First, I always try to teach them not to be intimidated by their professors. I take my inspiration here, ironically enough given the way he uses language, from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s argument in Homo Academicus, that academics bludgeon non-academics with mostly meaningless technical vocabulary, is very attractive to many students. Some of them want to believe the emperor has no clothes. Second, to drive the first point home, I try to show them how easy it is to use academic vocabulary when it is defined. Of course, academics will never define buzzwords but that’s just the point. When students understand just what these words mean the spell is broken. Third, I ridicule the stuff myself (of course, I try not to push it too far lest I be perceived as merely cynical). I tend to believe that students become academics who use this nonsense because they are impressed by professors and older students who use this nonsense. In this vein, I like to use a certain Calvin and Hobbes strip. Ridicule is a petty tool but it is effective. Fourth, I teach the classics, and Plato in particular, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Sophists haven’t changed much over the past 2,400 years and the old responses are as effective now as they were in the past. For those who aren’t academics, these techniques should work equally well.

It would be better, of course, to teach them the truth rather than the mere recognition or rejection of falsehood. But most of us are limited in what we can do at our respective institutions. I am thankful, at least, that I can hope some of my students might not take this stuff seriously. Does this constitute defeating it? Probably not. Defeating this stuff will only come, I suspect, when the material conditions that allow so great a waste to persist disappear and the spiritual conditions that allow so great a delusion to continue are shown to be bankrupt.

I was not conflating the three, simply stating that they are the bricolage handed out to students of literature. In my opinion, deconstruction can be turned against any metanarrative; However, this does not stop professors of literary theory from sneaking their own into the classroom. At another time, we could discuss the individual merits of each theoretical device.

As far as the Jacobin virtues go, I stand by that as a broad brush description of the virtues preached in literature courses.

Rod, I will have to give your question more thought. Goodnight all. Much love.

You might appreciate Quaker liberal arts colleges. Being taught mostly by Friends, they’re remarkably straightforward about their agenda, while not really pushing it. I remember it as being more in the vein of, “This is what we believe, and it you believe it too, that’s great.” That kind of attitude leaves little need for people to abuse the English language.

“Where does a young person who actually loves literature and the humanities go to study to be a scholar and a professor, and avoid this nonsense? Is it possible?”

Having once sent a simply inquiry to the C.S. Lewis Foundation, I am on the mailing list for all kinds of appeals and announcements. I may even have sent a donation once. I haven’t made up my mind whether something good will come out of the effort to open C.S. Lewis College in Massachusetts, but it may provide an answer to precisely that question. It seems that they intend a thorough study of philosophy, in all its ancient breadth and depth, a good grounding in the classics, and a thorough study of literature on its own terms. All of this is planned to be done in small groups, modeled somewhat on Oxford.That could be quite valuable.

(Of course, in another sense, UC-Santa Cruz was intended to be modeled somewhat on the colleges of Oxford University.)